It’s been a while.

Holy damn it has been three weeks since the last How About Notflix review. Sorry folks, been busy with life and haven’t watched many movies in the last few weeks.

Blood & Gold comes to us from Peter Thorwarth, a name you might be familiar with if you waste hundreds of hours of your life every year watching dumb shit movies even tabloid critics won’t review for a blog that doesn’t pay you anything. I’m just kidding, I have no clue how popular Thorwarth’s films are in Germany. IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes don’t seem too keen on listing German review outlets but his last film from 2021, Blood Red Sky, scored an 82% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics. I’m sure he’s fine.

I came out of Blood & Gold with two thoughts: First, that Robert Maaser would make a spot-on BJ Blazkowicz if they ever film a live action Wolfenstein film. The second is that film critics are really shit at their job. I’ve seen a lot of comments describing Blood & Gold as “Tarantino-esque,” and it’s completely accurate if you’ve never watched a single Tarantino film.

Blood & Gold has nothing to do with Tarantino filmmaking. There’s none of the quippy dialogue found in Tarantino’s films, the blood is really knocked down six notches below what you’d expect in something like Pulp Fiction, there’s no trunk shots, no really good close up shots, no homages that stood out to other cinema, nobody got their feet licked, and nobody said the n word. And I doubt that Peter Thorwarth set out hoping people would compare this film to Inglorious Basterds.

The plot of the film centers around a couple of groups. First group is Heinrich (Robert Maaser), a German private who tries to flee the war and get back to his daughter. Heinrich is a captured by his own men who notice his chiseled Aryan features and conclude he must be hung. Also they hang him by his neck. Unfortunately they break the number one rule of murder; always stick around to make sure your target is actually dead. They scoot off because Nazis keep tight schedules and Heinrich is saved by farm girl Elsa (Marie Hacke) who nurses him back to health in her farm with her disabled brother Paule (Simon Rupp).

Meanwhile Baron Evil Nazi Von Starnfeld played by Alexander Scheer with the prerequisite Phantom of the Opera mask covering half of his stupid messed up face. The Nazis are in town because the Germans are losing the war and Starnfeld wants to get his shnitzel-eating ass out of the country before the inevitable wave of allied murder comes their way. His troops are hanging around because he’s privy to a stash of Jewish gold being kept secret by the townsfolk. Not that secret mind you considering everyone within a hundred mile radius seems to know about it.

Also meanwhile a group of townsfolk have hidden the gold and want to beat it out of town with said gold so they can live comfortably. Get it? Got it? Good.

One positive I can say about Blood & Gold is that the film is competently shot. The fight scenes, especially the one in the farmhouse toward the beginning, are enjoyable and very well choreographed and the actors are clearly talented at the work. There is a decent set of characters that are fleshed out enough that you are invested in them and get a little tinge of the feels when they are killed off suddenly and brutally.

The bigger problem with Blood & Gold is that it’s hardly the first WW2 “we have to find the stash of gold” films. Shit, it’s not even the second film with this plot that also happens to be a Great Value Tarantino film that I’ve seen over the last year. How the hell did I not write a review of Hell Hath No Fury? I swear to God I wrote that review at some point and just lost it. Either way, it’s hardly the kind of film you jump at the opportunity to watch.

I have a feeling a good portion of the audience will turn on this film the moment Thorwarth shows a guy with Downs getting brutally shot in the head. Don’t watch this with English dubbing.

Rating C